It's not quite quilting

Recently I went on a spending spree at JoAnn's and found these pretty awesome pre-quilted yards of fabric for babies with cute appliqués already on them too! They had several designs so I figured this would be an awesome way to try out quilting. I know this is hard to believe, but I have never quilted anything although I am aware that my sewing machine came with an arm extension, a free form foot, and a walking foot. I've been using the walking foot almost exclusively since discovering that it took away all the problems I was having with the fabric layers not feeding at the same rate.

So, I started to put together the quilt. I carefully cut the panel then the backing and then the batting. At first I referred to the information on one of those free 4x6 pattern sheets that they have hanging around in the store. Those are almost so worthless though since they don't have enough information. They are nice for project ideas, but not for actually executing the task at hand. So I asked my friend Google to help me find some information about quilting basics. I wasn't in the mood to look at a lot of sites so once I found one that looked like it had enough information with pictures I bookmarked it. I haven't gotten any further with the quilted baby blanket, but I have done quite a bit of reading on this site about how to make a quilt:  http://www.frugalvillage.com/forums/sewing-quilting/28024-putting-quilt-together-tutorial-3.html I'm sure that link will dump you to the 3rd page, but you'll figure out how to get to the beginning.

In the meantime, I decided that I at least need to familiarize myself with quilting and how the needle moves. After some time of looking and looking for a small quilted project I came up a make up bag tutorial which was perfect since I had almost surrendered to having to make a pot holder! The pdf of the tutorial is here:  http://4h.wsu.edu/clothing/quick_projects/MakeupBag.pdf

The project wasn't really quilting by what my mind wanted it to be, so I may take another stab at this and try doing a free form pattern to tack the layers together.

But at any rate, the bag turned out very cute and is now listed for sale at my Etsy shop!